Class and Condescension

I am not a Marxist, but I was one, sort of, in 1978. This is when I landed at an east-coast Ivy League university for graduate school (Yale), a refugee from the law (well, from law school anyway) and an aspiring historian of Anglo-American radicalism. As an undergraduate I had attended a public university on the opposite coast (University of California at Santa Barbara), a bastion of earnest anti-establishment vibes set in paradise, except that you were surrounded by rich Republicans, including Ronald Reagan. Students in the not too distant past had burned down the local branch of Bank of America, while Santa Barbara authorities had presciently started incarcerating homeless people so as not to sully the breath-taking views of ocean, mountains and faux Spanish architecture. Hence the Marxist critiques of contemporary civil society proffered by the most popular lecturers on campus resonated with my own discontents and with the contradictory politics of the campus, region and nation.

This experience made my first reading of The Making of the English Working Class an auspicious one. In many ways, Thompson’s anti-structuralist cultural Marxism should have made his text a perfect one for my new History Department, where Foucault was the ‘F’ word and Freud, Marx, Hegel and Gramsci (somehow seen as not ‘theoretical’) were the stars guiding my professors’ forays into the past. And yet Thompson’s book was considered to be a marginal one for at least one resident British historian, who advised me to focus on more bourgeois and upper-class topics (I kid you not). So I read Thompson’s classic in an American history class taught by distinguished historian David Brion Davis. In my mind, we spent several weeks on this book but I think it was only two; in either case what I got from it was nothing less than inspiration and an incitement to action. That class was not a ‘thing’ but a process and relationship, that politics was not ‘determined’ by economic relations but was produced through struggle and contest, and that political consciousness was as much a product of individual will as of fate or position – all these made the British past seem like an emergency to which I must attend (and I had yet to read Walter Benjamin).

Indeed, with my undergraduate studies of Tudor-Stuart history and especially of Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down still buzzing in my ears, Thompson’s loving, deeply textured and vibrant treatment of a cast of aspirant ‘redressers’, activists, conspirators and Luddites convinced me that I had to try to retrace the linkages between these two important revolutionary periods – the first English Revolution and the almost-second (or third) one – if only to demonstrate that Britain’s radical democratic traditions were alive and well and capable of casting a reproachful glare on the injustices and outrages of the present.

As we all know, The Making of the English Working Class (hereafter MEWC) galvanized the trend for ‘history from below’ on both sides of the Atlantic, but it also in certain unexpected ways opened the door to all sorts of assaults on established narratives and traditions.¹ This can best be seen by surveying Thompson’s critics. Joan Scott famously took the lead among feminist historians in busting him for his androcentric biases. Others less sympathetic lambasted Thompson’s lack of orthodox Marxian theory (no factory workers?!) or chastised him for being too doctrinaire (his Making was but a ‘mythic construct of determined imagination and theoretical presuppositions’).² And of course many others chose to honour the man and the book by revealing new worlds of political activity in the streets and taverns of towns and cities across America, France, Italy, India. In my own case, Thompson’s text was less interesting for its revelations about ‘class’ as such than for what it revealed about politics and what counted as political activity, both for our historical protagonists and for us as historians. Indeed, MEWC and its rich evidentiary base helped me to learn how to read ‘against the grain’ of established historical verities by using material evidence that was...